Tag Archives: star party

Saturday April 21 was International Astronomy Day, and while I held out a bit of hope I would make it to one of the daytime / solar star parties in Gloucester, I didn’t actually get going until after supper, just in time to head to the Canadian Aviation and Space Museum where RASC Ottawa was hosting a night-time star party. Not quite the big setup of our monthly summer parties in Carp, but still a decent number of people. In addition, my friend Rennie was going with his family to get used to setting up his scope. He has the same scope as mine, and we’re hoping he can jumpstart his learning and success curve a bit by piggy-backing off my now working alignment process.

As the first time of the season, I have to admit, I was pretty slow setting up. It was like I’d forgotten how ANYTHING attached to ANYTHING else. Surprisingly, I hadn’t forgotten any parts. I keep forgetting to make myself a bullet-proof checklist that I can double-check before leaving to make sure I have the main things (eyepieces, tube, mount, chair, and battery) as well as the extras (filters, bug spray — thankfully not yet!, etc.). Most importantly, I remembered a key astronomy tool — warm footwear.

It is incredible how fast cement can suck the heat right out of your shoes or light boots. I wore my full winter boots, and after 3 hours, my feet were done. But the three hours went well. I helped Rennie align his TelRad (the raw star finder to get you in the vicinity of stuff, like a spotting scope) and then we used Stellarium to help us find a good star to start with for our alignment. We saw Venus (white blob) and Venus slightly filtered (dull white blob), and of course the Moon. There were some public members and when they found out I was the Star Party Coordinator, I got a lot of questions. Rennie’s family and friends included a bunch of little ones, and they were tuckered out and cold before too long.

I stuck around until about 11:00, mostly just long enough for two things. First, I wanted to see Jupiter and it wasn’t yet above the trees. Second, I wanted to try out my new-to-me filter wheel. Essentially you put four or five filters in it (actually usually four, leaving the fifth one empty to have an “unfiltered” view), and then you can simply rotate the dial to switch filters easily. I took four that were great for Venus — but by the time I got around to breaking them out, seeing how it all worked, Venus was long gone. I tried them on Jupiter just to see, and one was just okay, but that was more about the angle than anything else. I also tried them on the moon, and one I quite liked just because it took the glare off. But there are separate ones for that type of reduced brightness, and I hadn’t planned on trying those, so hadn’t set up for it.

Most people were gone or packing up by the time I left, but it was one cold night.

Which of course meant Rennie and I had to try again on Sunday night at the Fred Lossing Observatory! Rennie got there before me, and he and his friend Philip had set up the big scope (there’s an 18″ scope there you can use, if you get trained and pay a fee). I just wanted to observe through my scope. It’s a bit of a hike out there, and I need to wrap my head around going more regularly. Nice dark skies, way better than anything I have access to closer. And there’s a warming room and portable toilet if needed. Still, it’s a 45 minute drive. Here’s a look at the warming room on the left and observatory with a roll-off roof, followed by a shot of the setup of the big scope (photos compliments of Rennie).

When I arrived, Venus was about to disappear behind some trees, but I really wanted to try my filter wheel. There was a nip in the air, and I thought about just observing with Rennie and Philip for a bit and not setting up, but I mean, really, I’d driven all that way, right?

But with Venus about 2 minutes from disappearing, I wouldn’t get set up in time. No problem, Rennie’s scope is IDENTICAL to mine, more or less. So I took my eyepiece, and my filter wheel, and with Rennie’s permission, I tried out the colour filters on Venus in his scope. According to the more informed people online, the best filters to try on Venus are 25 Red, 38A Dark Blue, 47 Violet, and, to a lesser extent, 12 Yellow. I tried all four. Yellow and red were interesting, but I wouldn’t say I saw much more than slightly less bright white. The Dark Blue and Violet just changed the colour to weird (particularly the blue), and I felt I was losing detail, not gaining it. But, again, it was about to disappear behind the trees so I didn’t have a lot of time — in fact, after Rennie and Philip looked, Venus was gone.

I managed to get set up after that and I was reasonably happy with my new cases for accessories. I did a new case and layout for my eye pieces and filters, and the two turned out okay. Not perfect, but way better than I initially hoped.

I even have a bit of room to expand, which is handy. Of course, now that I’ve seen Rennie’s setup for his actual scope stuff, I’m thinking more ambitiously for that too! 🙂 I’m going to check out Home Depot this weekend for some suitable cases to use. But I digress.

I used Stellarium again, aligning on Betelgeuse and Arcturus. I totally forgot that I have a “recommended list” for my scope and that April’s are Procyon and Regulus. But the other two worked fine. I hadn’t really planned out my observing, mainly just wanted more practice getting setup, aligned, and observing.

Now, one of the nice parts of having a “go to” computerized scope is that you can also do a Sky Tour as part of the setup. It basically has a database of 40K+ objects in the sky, and based on what you enter as your coordinates and alignment stars, time of day, date, etc., it knows what are the best things to see in the sky at that time. I’ve done sky tours in the past when I didn’t have good alignment and most of the time I didn’t “see” anything in the eyepiece. It just wasn’t aligned well enough, so when I went to look, and bearing in mind I didn’t know exactly what I was supposed to see since I hadn’t seen it before, I didn’t have a lot of success.

Tonight, by contrast, was relatively awesome. Most good amateur astronomers would NOT do what I did … I looked at probably 75 objects in about two hours. When you include slew time, that equates to about a minute an object. Sometimes less. Plus I was occasionally taking notes on a white screen phone, totally destroying my night vision repeatedly. But perfection wasn’t the goal, I just wanted to see if my alignment let me see stuff worth seeing. And I confess, in part, to note some of those things so that when I’m at a star party or out with my family, I can say, “Hey, let’s look at M82, the Cigar Galaxy, it’s kind of cool.” Right now, I feel I’m almost looking at things randomly based on others recommendations, I rarely have a set plan. I know what I need to do, but just haven’t gotten to that point yet. Tonight I wanted to see Venus and Jupiter, and I toyed with the idea of some photos of the moon on my smartphone, but instead I decided to concentrate on the pre-programmed Star Tour.

Some highlights (with full inventory at the bottom):

Double Cluster — Looks best in 32mm for brightness and fitting everything in view;

M82 — Cigar galaxy, I saw it! but more zoom = less light;

Ghost of Jupiter –awesome sight, almost bluish, 25mm;

M104 — Sombrero Galaxy, I saw it, with more zoom = less light;

M53 — Bright globular cluster, 17mm;

M57 — Ring Nebula, visible, little colour, 17mm;

M3 — Bright globular cluster, 17mm;

M5 — Rose Cluster, globular, bright at 17mm;

M13 — Hercules globular cluster, bright at 17mm;

M92 — Globular, bright at 17mm;

M52 — Another Salt and Pepper?, open star but bright;

Overall, I saw 23 Messier objects, however briefly, and made up the list of 11 top highlights to see again. Preferably in not so rushed a way.

By this time, Jupiter was just edging over and peeking through the trees, but we were all pretty cold, so decided to hang out in the warming room for ten minutes. I was relatively okay for warmth outside with layers, but even my boots were hitting their limits at the three-hour mark. But back out we went and saw Jupiter and the moon. By then, it was time for me to pack it in. As happy as I was with everything, I was cold, tired, and it was a school night, as they say. Plus I still had to drive 45 minutes back to home. Fortunately, I park in a garage, so when I got home, I could just crash and leave everything in the car overnight. Definitely looking forward to some warmer weather.

Philip and Rennie stuck around a bit more, still experimenting with a laptop connected to his scope and some astrophotography with the big scope. They managed to capture the following shots of the moon and Jupiter, which was pretty reflective of what I saw before I bailed.

We’ll take it as a first night (or second night) out with the scope for the season. Rennie wants to play with some AP in future outings (using my smartphone attachment or my webcam, or both), and I want to nail down a list of good objects to view and at which magnitude. Plus keep playing a bit with my filters.

The full list of my observations for the night is below, but until next time,

Catalog of Observations

Eta ant — double, okay at 17mm;

Almach — double, okay at 17mm;

Double Cluster — Looks best in 32mm for brightness and fitting everything in view;

This past weekend, skies were looking promising and so I planned to do two star parties back to back. Friday night was the first one in Carp, the last RASC star party of the year. I’m not only a member, I’m actually serving as the acting star party coordinator. We have marshals though to cover if I’m not actually there, so mainly my job is to send out the notification emails in advance as reminders, and then make the call for the day before or day of the event.

I was a bit later arriving there than I had hoped, not getting there until about 6:30 p.m., so had to set up in the dusk. Long past the sun dropping below the horizon and taking the moon and three or four planets with it. I was wondering if I would be able to see Mars, Jupiter or Venus if I was using my solar filter as they are really close to the sun, but I wasn’t overly hopeful. I never got to try though.

Saturn was still up, so that was good. Turnout was about average, maybe 20+ scopes with the big 25″ from one of the members down at the end. I wandered down around 9:00 p.m. and the line-up was about 25 people long, and apparently was even longer at times.

I had this great idea to use a special list I organized on my tablet as my viewing targets, and it went out the window pretty fast as I didn’t have it set up early enough to avoid blinding people with white light while I got it going. So I did my basic alignment and some star tour stuff, before heading for seeing Saturn. Shortly after I got going, someone wandered over to say they had a new 8SE, same scope as mine, and would I mind coming over and helping him get going as he was having trouble with the red dot finder. Don’t we all?

I felt like it was time to repay some of the help I’ve received from others. Lots of people are reading my blog entries about my alignment problems, often looking for tips and tricks to see what might help them. But within RASC, I’m more often the one asking for help than giving it. It was nice to be able to explain some of the setup steps, how to make it work well the first time, etc. And more importantly, to get the dang red dot finder to align on a red light above the Diefenbunker. One alignment on Mizar and one alignment on Altair later, and he was aligned. First target was Saturn, and it was awesome to hear his excitement in seeing it in HIS scope and to then immediately call over his son who had passed the initial patience point several minutes before (I’ve been there, I recognize it!). They looked at a bunch of stuff for the rest of the night and it sounds like it went well.

Then I lost my scope. Not really. It was just that I wandered back, and of course it’s VERY dark, and I couldn’t even FIND where I had set up. I had to wander back the opposite way twice to just to figure out where I was. Mostly as there were people looking through it at Saturn still. 🙂

I looked at a few things, and then I heard someone say in passing that the only planet available was Saturn. And I thought, “Wait a minute. I know I looked at Uranus and Neptune a week or two ago, they should still be up now.” So I went looking. Until I found Uranus. So then some visitors wandered over, and we all agreed yes it was disc like and yes we thought it was Uranus. Hard to see it in a simple 25mm eyepiece or even my 17.3mm. But one of the other RASC members came over and confirmed it was indeed Uranus. So we tried for Neptune. That one we were far less certain of, but we did find something disc-like, just without the tell-tale blue. But again, the member confirmed it was indeed Neptune, which made one of our guests quite happy — he had now see all 7 visible planets in a scope. Beats me — I haven’t seen Mercury yet.

Two more guys wandered by and we started looking at nebulae. The nearby member also lent me an Oxygen III filter to pull out some details from the Veil Nebula which was cool, albeit quite dark with the filter on. We looked at a bunch of objects for about 90 minutes. Mostly as the one guy is thinking of buying a scope like mine, and wanted to experience it. Around 11:00, I think, I happened to notice that Orion was up, and someone mentioned the Orion Nebula. I hadn’t seen it in almost two years, so I was in. But the guy loaned me a UltraBlock filter. Which made the nebula just “pop”. Eloquent as always, I think my official comment was “Holy crap!”.

After the two guys left, a couple came along where it was obvious the guy was super interested and his girlfriend was playing supportive partner. She was interested, but she clearly had passed her interest point. Nevertheless, she was game to keep going, so we split some stars, looked at Uranus, etc. Just before the end of the night, I wandered down to the 25″ scope to see M15 and then looked at it afterwards on my own much more pitiful 8″ scope. It was almost laughable the difference. On the other hand, mine fits in the back of my car; the 25″ travels in a horse trailer. I love to see through it, but man, it’s HUGE.

And that was it for the night. And for the season. Sad to see it go, particularly as I have everything working now!

On Saturday, I ran by the telescope store to talk about filters and a specific EP that I have, checked a few things out for their “used” items, and then I headed out to Luskville for the AstroPontiac evening. I’m on the Board, although that mainly means I try to go to their star parties, I do the website, and I sign some docs from time to time. My friend is the main driving force, and he has some good results to show for it.

My son had asked to go on Friday night to the Star Party in Carp, but with my marshal duties, I wasn’t planning on leaving until after midnight, too late for him. So I planned around him coming to Luskville, along with my wife, and we got there just between 5:00 and 5:30 p.m. Not that there was any rush. The skies were REALLY overcast.

Fortunately, it’s right next to the Luskville Falls hiking trail, so we went and looked at the waterfalls and then had a little picnic dinner while watching leaves fall in the dusk light and listened to the falls themselves crashing in the distance.

Just after 7:00, I said, “Why not?” and I tried setting up out of sure force of will. The skies weren’t cooperating, but perhaps if I set up, they’d open up. They were supposed to clear at 8:00 p.m., but it wasn’t certain. We crossed our fingers.

I did manage to catch Saturn not long after 7:00 through a small opening in the clouds. I wasn’t aligned, but I could manually spot it. The clarity / seeing was pretty low quality, but we saw it. Then the hole closed and we waited. Just after 8:00, it did look like it was going to clear…some of the clouds started to drift away, I managed to do an alignment, and then they clouded back in again.

My friend managed to keep a bunch of people engaged for about 45 minutes explaining the sky, even if he couldn’t show it to them. And I passed the time giving an interview to the local press about the Initiative. That was a first for me.

Not too long after 9:00, we called it a night and started packing up. Most of the night, Jacob was in the car playing on his tablet, which is the reason I brought it. Sitting around in the dark talking about skies we’ve seen in the past isn’t that exciting for him. I managed to show off some of my old photos of what is possible to see even with a basic scope, but that’s a pale imitation of the real thing.

However, although it wasn’t the BEST NIGHT EVER or anything, it was still fun. We can’t always have great nights, but we can make whatever night we have as great as possible. And any night I can see Saturn, I call a win.

I have a Celestron NexStar 8SE telescope…for those not in the know, that’s an 8″ optical tube on a simple tripod. They call them one-armed bandits (like the slot machines) because there is a single arm that goes from the tripod mount that it rests on up to the tube. Simple, easy to work, but it isn’t very stable, at least not in astronomical viewing terms. It doesn’t allow for much in the way of astro photography due to its limited ability to track the sky over time, thus limiting the photography options of long-exposures. However, there is one feature where the 8SE shines — it’s ease of use.

This was a key ingredient for me in buying a scope, based on knowledge of who I am and the patience I have. If a scope takes 30 minutes to setup, I’m not likely to use it. I need something relatively simple, and the 8SE requires you to basically setup the tripod, attach the scope to the arm, add some power and eyepieces, and you’re good to go. More or less.

The second feature that was a huge selling feature for me is what they call the “go to” feature. You run a simple alignment procedure on the scope, the computer on the mount figures out what stars you are looking at, and after that, it knows where all the other stars and planets should be. So, in theory, you do the alignment, and then after that, you look at a menu, tell it you want to see Saturn, and Bob’s your uncle, the computer will slew your scope around to Saturn. Tell it to show you the Ring Nebula, and bam, there it is.

Except my scope didn’t seem to do that. Sure, it found the moon and planets pretty well, not always dead centre, but certainly within the eyepiece. But beyond that, I have never really seen much. I’ve had the scope just over two years, and while large periods of time in there were “down time”, I have used it a fair number of times. Almost always on my own though, and never with another scope right beside me to show me what I “should” be seeing. Or not seeing, as the case may be. Even in the dark skies near my inlaw’s cottage, I saw interesting things, but no nebulae, no galaxies. Variable stars, definitely planets, but no real deep sky objects (DSOs). It has been rather frustrating, and I was never quite sure what the problem was. A couple of times I felt like almost pitching the hobby, since I didn’t see much more than planets. Cool, sure, but long term without photography? I wasn’t sure what the problem was, but I was determined to find it before giving up the hobby.

A few weeks ago, I was at a star party organized by the RASC Ottawa Centre out in Carp (just west of Ottawa in a dark parking lot). After most of the lookie-loos had left, I was talking to a guy next to me who was showing the Ring Nebula, so I popped over, looked through his scope and there it was, clear as day. I went back to my scope, pulled up the Ring Nebula from my menu, slewed to it, and nothing. Nothing even close to it in my scope. His scope was different from mine (a Dobsonian), but not any more powerful, so I said, “Shouldn’t I be able to resolve it too?”. He said of course, came over, looked through the scope and said, “Hey, your alignment is off”. And with those five words, my random series of possible problems collapsed to a range around one. He adjusted my scope, I looked, and sure enough, there it was, easy peasy lemon squeezy. I didn’t know whether to laugh in relief that my scope could resolve it or cry because I’d wasted 2 years trying to figure out how to work it properly.

The larger range of possibilities

I had been wondering if the problem was amongst a bunch of possibilities. First and foremost, it was possible my eyes were just not good enough to see the faint objects. I am getting older, turned 47 recently, and as you get older, fainter objects are harder and harder to see. But when the other guy put my scope on the Ring Nebula, that possibility was clearly eliminated.

Second, I wondered if my scope wasn’t good enough. I had bought one of the higher-end entry level scopes, but wondered if maybe I’d chosen wrong (sacrificing viewing too much) or just got a lemon with bad optics. But the Ring Nebula was visible, so not optics. Neither the scope nor of eyepieces either.

Third, I had been wondering if maybe it was the suburban skies — perhaps they were just too light polluted for me to see these things, as most of my viewing happens in city parks, etc. While this was a darkened parking lot, it is by no means a dark site, so no problem there.

Last, I had considered it might be an alignment issue, but planets were always aligned, and most large stars like Antares, Polaris, etc. But with this guy’s five minutes of help, all the possibilities collapsed to this one…my alignment was off.

Fixing alignment

As with the larger range above, there are lots of reasons why the scope could be misaligned. With the help of some people online who have the same scope, and the people at the store who sold me the scope, I compiled a list of things to try.

The first thing I had to check was the physical setup. My scope was always pretty level early on, so I had stopped fussing about it too much. Never seemed to make much difference, the computer knew where the stars were, so I was golden, or so I thought. I’ve added a bubble level app to my phone and now use that to try to get my mount as level as possible, still using the vibration pads to limit shake.

Next, I looked at the initial computer setup. Normally, I keep it set for Ottawa and just have to put in the time and location. That has always seemed a bit general to my mind, but since the computer always seemed to figure it out, I went with it before. This time, I upgraded to a wifi connector that ties directly to my phone — which gives it my precise GPS location as well as local time down to the second. Can’t get much more precise than that.

Third, I have been really inconsistent with my choice of stars. I would say generally I was choosing stars in a 90-120 degree section of the sky most of the time. In some cases it was simply because that was the part of the sky I could see, other times it just happened to be where the first few bright stars were located. Other times, when I was particularly impatient, I’d even used planets as one of the three stars in the three-star alignment process. The computer let me do it, and I’d read instructions online that said you could do it — I didn’t realize they were saying you could do it, not that you should do it. Using a planet apparently adds in a lot of variability to the calculations, as does using stars close together. So, I changed my setup — I now use stars as far apart as possible, and try to cover as much of the sky as I can in my setup with three stars far from each other. Almost like an equilateral triangle in the sky.

Finally, I have always had a question about which eyepieces to use when I’m aligning. The scope comes with a 25mm plossl, but I also have a really nice 17.3mm Televue, a 10mm Televue Delos, and an 8mm Televue plossl. I was never sure how zoomed in I should be to say it was centred in the scope but I tended to use the 17mm lens. Both the online community, the help pages for the scope and the store had the same recommendation for change — buy a 12 mm red-lighted reticle eyepiece and use that to ensure it is centred. If that sounds confusing, it is basically a higher powered eyepiece than the one I was using before, and the red light reticle is an illuminated cross-hairs design…put the star in the centre of the crosshairs and tell the computer it is aligned. No guessing if it is in the “centre” of the eyepiece — it’s dead centre when it’s in the cross-hairs.

I had four other possibilities to try messing with if these four didn’t fix the problem … it could have been the mount itself (I had problems with gears meshing last year, but this problem predated that issue); my scope could have been out of alignment on the optics (had already checked that a few months ago, still perfectly aligned); my diagonal coul d have been out of whack (which could be checked at the store); or my firmware on the mount could have been out of date. They were on my list of possibilities affecting my alignment, but the others were easier to check first against “normal” setup.

The results

Apparently, I’ve just been a complete idiot for two years. If the guy at the star party hadn’t told me that my alignment was off, I’d still have been struggling to find the problem. I did the four steps above (physical leveling, wifi with coordinates, better star choices, and a illuminated reticle eyepiece).

Got it all setup, but had a lot of trouble with focusing on stars the night I tried due to haze (just bad seeing), took me more than an hour to align. And then as I was just about done, my wifi connector dropped the signal and I lost my setup. So I took a fifteen minute break, let some clouds pass by, and then tried again. Five minutes and I was done.

First test was a planet, but that was too easy. So I chose the Ring Nebula. And BAM! There it was. Easily seen from my light polluted park. It was awesome. I wandered around the sky on the app just trying out a bunch of things. I still have not seen the big galaxies, not quite sure why those are not resolving but could have been time of day. Clusters are perfect. Double stars. Variable stars. Everything shows up. It isn’t quite centred each time, but it’s within the field of view, so the margin of error is manageable. Over time, I hope that will improve as I improve my alignment procedures.

Overall though, I’m back on track. As I said earlier, I can’t decide between being happy everything is working the way it should or that it didn’t work for the last two years because I didn’t know what I was doing.

I’m sure there are lots of people reading this and laughing because they think anyone who uses a go to scope is an idiot anyway. Feel free to do so, but it just means you missed the upfront side of things. I do know how to star hop, and I can find things, but it’s not how I’m wired…when I’ve done it, I can find stars, but nothing else. Now I can use the GoTo scope to at least let me see what it is I’m supposed to find, and then learn to starhop between things better with some expectation of success. It’s also a bit of the reason why I’ve struggled on my own for 2 years — there are a lot of nobs out there who basically turn into technique snobs and rather than help someone who is learning to do it one way, they instead say “Oh that way is stupid, here’s the only way to do it.” Different strokes for different folks.

But one guy who helped for five minutes with no attitude or judgement altered my entire experience. I’m back “in” for the hobby, and I never even caught his name!